I listened to a podcast where an author spoke about using agentic AI to
make a writing "team". He had beta reader/critics responding from
specific perspectives, another grammar LLM, and an editor LLM - he'd
pass drafts back and forth between them like they were people as part of
the process. I have a couple of paid LLMs - Microsoft CoPilot for 365 as
part of a subscription, and Perplexity (I have a 3 month free trial
program). I started playing with them to see how they could benefit.

I was trying to research a science-fiction book I'd read as a teenager,
I only knew the name of one of the races in book, and tried Gemini,
Perplexity, ChatGPT and CoPilot. Only ChatGPT pulled up the book title
and author, along with a summary - and this was the free ChatGPT
version.

I assume that's more a function of the training library, not the LLM
itself.

Then, I tried giving them outlines of plot ideas to write - Gemini came
in last, the others were comparable. As a last task, I asked them all to
write a 500-word short story about an astronaut stranded on Mars, with
elements of the story Robinson Crusoe on Mars and The Martian.

ChatGPT felt more nuanced, CoPilot even used the names of the sources in
the story. Perplexity felt like a direct-to-dvd version of "The Martian"
that you'd see one on of those free channels on Roku".

I think I'll use CoPilot when writing, I like the idea of training it on
my own documents and having it easily identify my writing style and body
of work out of the box.



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Or you can just... you know... write.

---
Ganiman
bbs.madetoraid.com:[2323/2222]

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Re: Re: Writing with LLMs
By: Ganiman to poindexter FORTRAN on Mon Sep 15 2025 10:16 pm

Or you can just... you know... write.

It would be helpful to quote what you're replying to so that it's easy for people to follow the conversation (especially the person you're repying to).

Nightfox

Hello Nightfox!

** On Tuesday 16.09.25 - 10:28, Nightfox wrote to Ganiman:

It would be helpful to quote what you're replying to so that it's easy for people to follow the conversation (especially the person you're repying to).

Your system doesn't support threading?

References of "Writing with LLMs"
1636 14.09.25 poindexter FORTRAN Writing with LLMs
166 15.09.25 ├──Ganiman
395 16.09.25 │ ├──Nightfox

Your post links to the two previous ones just fine here. ;)



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Re: Writing with LLMs
By: Ogg to Nightfox on Tue Sep 16 2025 06:21 pm

It would be helpful to quote what you're replying to so that it's easy for
people to follow the conversation (especially the person you're repying
to).

Your system doesn't support threading?

Yes, but it's still considered good etiquette to quote what you're responding to.

Nightfox

BY: Ganiman (21:3/174)
On Monday,September 15, 2025 at 09:16 PM, Ganiman (21:3/174) wrote:

Or you can just... you know... write.

Exactly. I am not buying any book from any author that is AI written slop. And most publishers will ban you immediately when it is found out that you use AI to write.

People pay artists and writers to create art -- not to use AI to create junk.

-dmxrob


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Re: Re: Writing with LLMs
By: Dmxrob to Ganiman on Wed Sep 17 2025 01:23:23

Hi, Rob.

Exactly. I am not buying any book from any author that is AI written slop. And most publishers will ban you immediately when it is found out that you use AI to write.

It worries me how much I see people depending on ChatGPT - people in work, people I sit next to on the train, university professors... I feel like my brain is rusting up enough from age without speeding it up by outsourcing my thought to a machine as well.

I was recently involved in a tender to be allowed to sell into certain types of public sector organisations - the instructions for applicants stated in bold type that using ChatGPT / LLMs for *any* part of your response would result in immediate rejection. You still get people saying "oh well let's get ChatGPT to write an answer then we can just edit it". Give me strength!

BobW
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Re: Re: Writing with LLMs
By: Bob Worm to Dmxrob on Wed Sep 17 2025 08:23 am

It worries me how much I see people depending on ChatGPT - people in work, people I sit next to on the train, university professors... I feel like my brain is rusting up enough from age without speeding it up by outsourcing my thought to a machine as well.

I'm a software engineer, and recently my manager at work asked me if I've tried using Copilot to write any code. Maybe it's just to try to justify the company buying Copilot licenses.. I don't really want to rely on AI to write code though, at least not fully. I've also seen AI-generated code be very wrong, or sometimes it would give the same as something I'd find with a Google search.

Nightfox

Re: Re: Writing with LLMs
By: Dmxrob to Ganiman on Wed Sep 17 2025 01:23 am

Exactly. I am not buying any book from any author that is AI written slop. And most publishers will ban you immediately when it is found out that you use AI to write.

People pay artists and writers to create art -- not to use AI to create junk.

Pretty much this. Among other things, because when things are computer generated, it *shows*.

Heck, even computer assisted translations need a lot of reworking in order not to feel you are reading pure computer output.


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Re: Re: Writing with LLMs
By: Bob Worm to Dmxrob on Wed Sep 17 2025 08:23 am

It worries me how much I see people depending on ChatGPT - people in work, people I sit next to on the train, university professors... I feel like my brain is rusting up enough from age without speeding it up by outsourcing my thought to a machine as well.

I don't see that much people using it actively, other than for entertainment. Some friends of mine use it to generate boilerplate code or unit tests, but they always have to fix it themselves, so it is not like they are letting the computer do all the work blindly.

I was recently involved in a tender to be allowed to sell into certain types of public sector organisations - the instructions for applicants stated in bold type that using ChatGPT / LLMs for *any* part of your response would result in immediate rejection. You still get people saying "oh well let's get ChatGPT to write an answer then we can just edit it". Give me strength!

I don't think it is bad to have a computer generate some ideas for you to work on. Copyediting computer output, however, is outright cheating.


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On 17 Sep 2025 at 09:02a, Nightfox pondered and said...

Re: Re: Writing with LLMs
By: Bob Worm to Dmxrob on Wed Sep 17 2025 08:23 am

It worries me how much I see people depending on ChatGPT - people in people I sit next to on the train, university professors... I feel li brain is rusting up enough from age without speeding it up by outsour my thought to a machine as well.

I'm a software engineer, and recently my manager at work asked me if
I've tried using Copilot to write any code. Maybe it's just to try to justify the company buying Copilot licenses.. I don't really want to
rely on AI to write code though, at least not fully. I've also seen AI-generated code be very wrong, or sometimes it would give the same as something I'd find with a Google search.

I've been playing with it recently (well, Claude, not ChatGPT).
I've found it about 2/3 miss and 1/3 hit.

Recent tasks include using it as a glorified search engine,
asking for specific points about the use of a particular
library I wanted to program against, for example. It was...
ok for that. I asked it to generate an example program, and
it was able to do so, but that program was deficient in some
ways. When I asked it to explain the rationale behind some
of the choices, it hallucinated a bunch of nonsense.

Another time, I asked it to explain what, I'm pretty sure, is
a bug in the GNU assembler; specifically, I made it do a bunch
of analysis that I could have done myself, but which would
have been tedious and time consuming. It did an adequate job
of pinpointing the section of code I wanted it to, but
alternated confidently between asserting that the observed
behavior was intended or a bug.

In both cases, my conclusion was that, had I not already had
decent sense of what was going on in both cases, I'd have spent
a _lot_ of time chasing wild geese.

Automated generation of boilerplate code is all well and good,
but even for that, I'm not really seeing the value-add. My
real desire is to use these tools as a research assistant, and
for that, they still fall well short of the mark. Like a bad
intern that speaks with the confidence of a pretty big ego on
one hand, but the sycophantic obsequiousness of an ass-kisser
waiting to stab you in the back.

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I've also seen AI-generated code be very wrong, or
sometimes it would give the same as something I'd find with a Google search.

Chances are that AI "stole" that answer from a web search.


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Ganiman wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

Or you can just... you know... write.

Preach, brother. While I'm intrigued by a team full of LLMs, I write on
a 45 cent spiral notebook with a Bic crystal pen. Blue, not black.

I appreciate reducing the art to the lowest common denominator and
writing words on paper instead of typing.



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Re: Re: Writing with LLMs
By: Dumas Walker to NIGHTFOX on Thu Sep 18 2025 09:45 am

I've also seen AI-generated code be very wrong, or
sometimes it would give the same as something I'd find with a Google
search.

Chances are that AI "stole" that answer from a web search.

Yeah, I think that's basically how they work.

Nightfox